From the long irrelevant ACLU, dated June 11, 2020:
So how’s that going? Let’s check in with CNN (September 25, 2022):
Shocking. Who, I ask you, who could have possibly foreseen that defunding, abusing, disparaging the police would embolden the criminals?
Ukrainian police use AK-47s (or maybe AK-74s, I can’t tell) to try to take out Russian anti-civilian buzz bombs. The *claim* is that they shot one down, but that’s hard to determine form the footage… it could well be that the thing just crashed where it did because that’s where it was aimed. They really need to get Tom Selleck on the case.
The Ukrainians, as unlucky as they’ve been, are lucky that they didn’t defund the police and replace them with social workers. I’m not sure that clipboards and unearned moral smugness would de-escalate an incoming raid of kamikaze drones.
A rotary cell phone where a lot of the functionality is mechanical. It’s a real device that is available for pre-order as a kit, for a price that seems remarkably reasonable ($390). Since it is not manufactured by a major phone or electronics company, I imagine that you’ll be SOL if anything goes wrong with it, especially electronically or with the software… customer support and repair seem like they’d be a challenge. But as a neato knickknack, it seems… neato.
Here’s a look at Book 4. Some of the diagrams I do are completed in just a few hours. Some take considerably longer… several to many man-days, sometimes spread out over months as I dial in details. This one was sort of mid-range. The most complex and time consuming are typically the diagrams of aircraft that were actually built… those have to be accurate, and more details are available. This one is of an unbuilt aircraft that is reasonably well documented, but was a configuration that was in a constant state of design flux.
The “new” version is deadlier (at least to mice). Now, I can see value in such work… create a nasty variant so you can *cure* or create a vaccine against said nasty variant before it pops up naturally or is created and weaponized by an antagonistic nation. Still: you might wanna kinda be careful about that sort of thing. If for no other reason than it makes for bad PR. Numerous news stories point out that this hybrid killed 80% of the mice infected with it. That’s bad. Fewer news stories point out that the original natural virus killed 100% of the mice infected with it. So it’s the kind of story that can be turned scary by dropping a bit of context. And science stories *always* lose context, because journalists seem to be a rather dim bunch, resistant to understanding the subjects they report on. So if you are a scientist working on something as touchy as this… maybe take a moment to reflect “Is this the sort of thing I should be doing, and if so, maybe I should have a really clear layman-level explanation ready to go.”
Russian losses are expanding beyond Ukraine…
Russian news agencies have reported that at least 13 people died when a warplane crashed on Monday into a residential area in the Russian port city of Yeysk after suffering engine failure.
Gotta admit, this is a hell of a shot (I assume it’s from some sort of security camera):
That pilot who saved himself and doomed an apartment building has some splainin’ to do.
The Russians have received 140 SU-34s, and have apparently lost 14 of them so far in the war. Maybe they shouldn’t go tossing them all willy-nilly into apartment blocks.
Over the years there have been suggestions of using “lithobraking” as a means of reducing the cost of transporting payloads to the lunar surface. As the name suggests, the idea is to use the lunar surface itself – the lithosphere – to slow the craft. Meteoroids do this all the time, of course, though in their case it’s pretty destructive. But for those rare serious suggestion of using lithobraking, the idea would be to lay out a miles-long “track” of smooth lunar dust; the spacecraft would come in at a *very* shallow angle and touch down at extreme – essentially orbital – velocity, and use skids to brake using friction. The precision required, and lunar infrastructure required, would be pretty substantial. One early suggestion of what a lithobraking spacecraft might look like is this (from HERE):
It might be workable. But it’s not something I’ve seen demonstrated too often, either practically or in animated form. Well, until now. At last, we have a good video representation of what lithobraking might look like in actual practice:
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Art from 1966 showing the S-IVB stage as launched on the SA-203 flight of the Saturn Ib, launched July 5, 1966. This flight put an S-IVb stage into orbit and demonstrated engine restart in microgravity, needed on the upcoming Apollo moon missions.
Or maybe not…
@quarantinedboredom1 #homeless #homelesspeople #oaklandcalifornia #oakland #encampment #living #alfresco #alfrescodining #debris #burned
This is the sort of problem that could be fairly easily fixed. Reinstate loony bins, lock up criminals, deport illegals, enforce the border, and cities will become far safer, cleaner, healthier places to live and work. They fact that those in power are *not* fixing this indicates that this is what they want.
Who benefits from tearing down civilization and spreading chaos and misery?
So “Halloween Ends” opened this weekend. On a budget of $20 million, it has made an estimated $41.25 million domestically in the opening weekend, pushing itself to profitability in a handful of days.
The low budget – $17 million – horror movie “Smile” has, in just a bit over two weeks, made $71.2 million, making it a rampaging success.
That’s nice. How is this newsworthy? Compare that performance to “The Woman King.” On a budget of $50 million, after a month it has made $59.7 million domestically. D’oh.
It seems the strategies of glorifying the actual villains while accusing the potential customers of being bad people didn’t work so great.
Snerk.
One of these days Hollywood types *might* figure out that hating the audience is not a good plan. In the mean time… keep hemorrhaging dollars, dorks.
